It’s 9/11 today in Ireland. Which means 9/11 was actually 11/9.

I’ve had this little fear inside me all day that at any moment i’m going to bite my finger while eating.

Hasn’t happened…

…yet.

Had to be connected to an ECG machine the other day.  Long story short, I had chest pains for a couple of days, that I still have and they were trying to rule out a dodgy ticker.  Which they did.  Good times.  This only meant that now they have now idea why I have piercing and crushing chest pains when I breath, move, sit still or blink.  Bad times.

So, €60 euro poorer and none the richer for knowing what’s wrong with me, I’m sitting here looking at my chest.

Wondering what’s going on in there.  My blood pressure is perfect, as the doctor announced with a tone of un-suppressed surprise.  As is my cholesterol and blood sugar levels.  The same three tests they always do with me.

Wondering what’s going on in there and causing me pain.  I inhale and although it hurts, my chest rises.  Hoping it won’t hurt when I exhale, I watch my chest lower again accompanied by the pain again.

Mostly though I’m looking at my chest and wondering why the nurse had to be such an utter and complete bitch.

She told me to take off my shirt, saucy.

I stripped sensually, moist.

She told me to lay on the bed, boing.

She asked me if I had ever done this before, please.

Before I could stutter out the affirmative, she had a razor out and proceeded to whip away all of my manly chest hair.  Shock, horror and disgust swept across my face and just as I was about to squeal a “what the fuck?”, she had sticky things all over the newly uncovered bits.

I can live with the highly trained and expensive professionals not having a bog about what’s wrong with me.  I can live with the pain and worry of not knowing either.  I cannot live with a patchy, itchy chest.

It took me all of puberty to grow that hair, the longest of which was 7 inches at one point protruding from my left nipple.  It took me every day since with much (masculine) shampooing, conditioning, exfoliating, combing and tlc to keep it there.

I’m not going back there, I will fight against their obvious conspiracy to rid me of my manhood.  I will run and hide, but keep my dignity and chest curlies.

Aye, fight and I may die. Run and I’ll live — at least a while. And dying in my bed many years from now, I would be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to go back there and tell my enemy that they may take my money, but they’ll never take my manhood!!!

Take some:

and add:

and you get probably the sexiest couple in the history of humanity.

I think it’s time for a couples Playboy centrefold.

How can you not love her.

When people interact, be it in person, phone, email, text, twitter, etc, by default someone communicates last.  In a one-on-one email/text/tweet I usually like to respond and in conjunction with someone who doesn’t mind eitherways this makes for a normal happy ending of me signing off.

But sometimes I’ll end up in a conversation with another sing-off-er, someone who will also want to politely respond, and we end up communicating back and forth, saying the most trivial things until someone caves.  It’s a funny situation.

1960s – mini dresses, mod fashion, the Beatles, psychadelic drugs, psychadelic colours, beatle cars.

1970s – flares, big hair, Abba, glam rock, Woodstock, Grease, Star Wars, Starsky and Hutch.

1980s – shoulder pads, even bigger hair, leg warmers, Dallas, Knight Rider, Ghostbusters, power ballads, Duran Duran, Bananarama, Stock Aitken and Waterman, Brat Pack.

1990s – ?

What would you fill in?

OK.

At the risk of sounding whiny, or of offending anyone, can I just ask if anyone else thinks it might be time for an overhaul of the way this blog looks?

It seems like the site has become a bit like your great aunt’s house. No-one really wants to visit because it’s oh-so-terribly dull, but everyone knows they ought to once in a while.

I know I’ve only put up two posts to date, but honestly, they bored me to tears when I read back over them. And I’m a very exciting person, people, so it couldn’t possibly be my fault.

Not that I’m offering my services for the re-vamp, mind you, I’m crap at that stuff.

Just saying, like.

Lets be frank. We humans live a fairly cocky existence. Everyone of us thinks that we are the shit. And I know what you’re thinking; “hold on a feckin second, I pride myself in my ability to see my faults and recognise that others are better.”, or some such absolute rhino excrement.

You see, the fact is we never practice any sort of self-examination with other species in mind. When we walk headfirst into a lamppost, we DON’T think “Jaysus, a monkey wouldn’t have done that”.

We think we are evolutions epic, perfect fluke.

What follows is a few reasons illustrating why we are not. Just ask yourself, have you ever seen a monkey do any of these things?

1. Has one ever been on the brink between the world of sleep and the world of wakeyness when something happens in a dream one is having that somehow merges with reality and causes one to kick out/jump, wallopin’ a limb of a bedpost/wall/headboard/partner. Not the action of a perfect organism.
2. Has one ever been trying to feed oneself, as one does on a regular basis, when one somehow mixes up that piece of toast with the inside of one’s mouth thus causing extreme pain by chewing and, hopefully, bringing the epic shitness of our species sharply into reality.
3. Like eating, most of us walk for almost all our lives. Yet we often momentarily forget the correct technique for this fundamental act and decide that smackin’ our big toe off any surface that isn’t glass smooth is the best experience since the orgasm.

Just a bit of evidence to support this theory. If you need more, I suggest you acquire a mirror and look in it.

I’ve only just remembered my own blogiversary and then got to thinking…my blogging beginnings were inextricably linked to the birth of The Blog Pound. And sure enough The Blog Pound is exactly 1 year, 1 week and 1 day old

Here’s the first ever post on The Blog Pound from Someone Living welcoming everyone

Of course Someone Living mentions that “the original 1506 posts are at the now deceased For Nine Pounds” however For Nine Pounds has since been resurrected with some new writers, so go pay them a visit.

My first post on The Blog Pound…a recollection of a rather strange dream. I can’t say I remember it at all now!

Happy Blogiversary to The Blog Pound, thanks to all the readers and commenters and well done to all the writers!

Have some cake on me.

There’s a scene at the beginning of Mad Men Season 2 that I found fascinating where – no spoilers – Don Draper’s talking to his former assistant Peggy who’s in a bad situation and he says to her something along the lines of ‘this never happened..you won’t believe how much it didn’t happened’. It explained so much about how he could justify his many infidelities and lies.

Anyway, I made a similar decision a few years back when something particularly embarrassing happened to straight away pretend to myself that it never happened, and it worked great. But i’ll share the story with you all the same.

I was at a music festival, mid afternoon, sunny day, main stage, up the front towards the left.  At one point I turned away from the stage and looked back towards the crowd.  My sister, who had been standing behind me, now in front of me, randomly asks if I was wearing anything under my t-shirt, and decided to pull it up to see – and  in that moment I was flashed to a crowd of up to a thousand or 2 people. ~I don’t think many people noticed thank god.

It was beyond the normal level of embarrassing so I decided to myself that it never happened and it’s funny because unlike every other embarrassing story that I have that kill me with the memory of it, i don’t even cringe when I retell this one.

NAMA this, FÁS that, John O’Donoghue acting the prick with his expenses and every other politician afraid to oust him because of their own expense abuse timebomb. We’re falling apart we really are.

I wouldn’t mind if our politicians and social leaders were merely corrupt. But corruption requires pre-meditation and an element of cleverness. What we have instead is incompetetence and inefficiency. With Brian Cowen, Mary “Palin” Coughlan, Dirty Willie, and the Lenihans driving the bus that’s not gonna change any time soon.

It must be time for a change, if not a revolution. But we the electorate people stakeholders haven’t the balls to do anything about it. Even the Opposition appear not to want to get in and do anything, they’d rather Fianna Fail try and clean up their own mess it seems.

I genuinely am worried as to the state of the nation we pass on to our children and grandchildren. If this was France there’d be riots on the streets. If it was Thailand there’d be a military coup. If it was anywhere else there’d be public upheaval. But it’s not it’s Ireland. And we settle for this shit.

Cross posted here.

You know what I’d do if Doc Brown turned up outside in the DeLorean?

• Gun it to 88mph, heading for Bedrock and do Wilma while Fred was at work.  Ditto for Betty.
• Wheelspin that badboy all the way to 1984 and tell Sarah Connor that I have to save her from the evils of future robots sent to kill her.  Did you see how quickly that lined worked?  Actually scratch that, I’d use it on Elisabeth Shue circa The Karate Kid.
• Put patents on the following: Tipp-ex, Sellotape, cocktail umbrella-ella-ellas, the plastic things on the ends of shoelaces, Microsoft, Madonna, Post-it notes, the word the, the likenesses of all the original Star Wars actors, and whatever next big money making fad comes along before you get the chance to.
• Visit Vanilla Ice and advise him to wait a few years and go see Dr Dre before Eminem does.  It could work.
• Call in a bomb scare at about 7am September 11th, 2001 to the world trade center and the Pentagon to try and have the buildings empty for the entire morning.  I’d offer to do the same with Poland around the 1st September 1939, but then Saving Private Ryan would never have been made.
• Track down the person who contracted AIDS from that sick monkey and bring him some porn and a Rubik’s Cube.  The world would be a different place if he hadn’t been bored and horny on the same day.
• Take the person who thought Jennifer Lopez ever had any talent or like-ability and get them an MRI scan, stat.
• Going to the date of my death, kidnapping myself and taking myself into the future,meaning I don’t die on that day, changing future history and creating a paradox in the space time continuum thingie making the world implode.  Y’know for shits and giggles.

What would you do?

…was “Go back to Romania!”

I’m half-Rwandan, half-Irish.

It was shouted by two girls who were young, but old enough to know better, from across the road while I was walking through a Dublin suburb. I stopped and looked at them, as I’ve always been taught to do. “Let them see that you’re a real person with feelings” is my father’s advice for such situations.

“Yeah, you. Fuck off nigger.”

At least they got that bit right, so to speak.

One of them then hocked up a good old phlegmer and tried to send it in my direction. It fell about 8 metres short and landed on her own leg before sliming its way down her jeans.

I wouldn’t say this kind of thing is common, but it happens more than you might think. This was not an isolated incident, just the most comical one. It’s usually just embarrassing, given that it sometimes happens publicly. People tend to look awkward as hell, like they want to do something, but are afraid to. I’ve rarely felt scared by it, perhaps because it’s generally only male coloured guys who get violence perpetrated against them.

It’s just ignorant, demeaning and generally not nice.

Hi, I’m Zara. Or at least that’s what we’ll call me here.

I join a very diverse list of bloggers here, including old favourites of mine like Darragh and Lottie. A lot of people seem to have wandered off elsewhere recently, which is presumably why I’ve been invited to contribute.

I’m not going to say much about myself for now, I’d prefer for bits and pieces to unfold as I go along. I intend to write some fairly frank pieces about some of my experiences in life. The line of work I’m in involves plenty of travelling, so that’ll most likely inform what I post here too.

I used to have this dream now and again, when I was younger. I was digging in the ground for something. The dream always started with me not knowing what I was digging for, but as I clawed my way through warm, alluvial soil I found what I suddenly knew I was looking for. It was a brand new colour, just lying there under a shallow layer of earth. It was a colour entirely different from any you’ve ever seen. It wasn’t some little-known shade of orange or purple, it was just brand new. I’d say just imagine it but you can’t, that’s the power of it. And I have no words that can describe an entirely new colour, none at all.

I don’t have that dream any more. I’ve given up hope of finding that new colour. But I think that the closest we can ever get to doing such a thing lies in the way we tell our stories to others, the way we combine all our familiar old words to form something as new as possible.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Is there anything more torturous than having to listen to Eamon Keane interviewing Joan Burton on radio?

I reckon no. It sounds like a bag of stray cats being pummelled with a sledgehammer. I’ve just turned them off yet my ears are still ringing. They have hurt my brain.

Someone please call Amnesty International.

We set our morals at a higher mind setting but at the end of the day social rules and biology win over with baseness.

We believe we should be judged on personality and not looks, yet we want people to find us physically attractive and put great effort into this.

We think attraction should be based on compatibility and not appearance but anyone who’s experienced love outside of attraction will have realised that as deep and pure the emotion is, it’s not addictive at all. Whereas attraction, which is generally appearance based, is very addictive. And hence biology would have me obsess and fret over the person with the nice tan and shun the one I have the strong connection with.

I’ve no ending to this post. It’s just my observation on the fickle way things are.

My lawn is small…yet I have  a lán mór machine that cuts grass.

I’ve come up with solution. A slight spray of life-killer (wear a mask!)…

Why are chefs celebrities?

More to the point, when they become celebrities, why do they behave like insufferable morons?

Watching a programme about chefs and there was this one chef in a restaurant somewhere in America that had become the latest haunt for B list celebrities and worked it’s way up the ladder to have A listers in there every night.  You’d be right to think that I wasn’t paying much attention, but my ears pricked up at this point:

“Most of my guests are emotional when it comes to food.  I’ve had guests literally reduced to tears when their dish arrived.  The presentation and spectacle of the experience just over whelms them and the flood gates open.”

Get.  Ta.  Fuck.

Anyone who gets that emotional over food needs to be locked in a basement with nothing but a handful of muesli thrown at them once a fortnight.  That might teach them one of the only times it’s acceptable to cry when receiving food.

Any chef who claims and believes in his own culinary abilities enough that he reckons they cause an emotional floodgate to burst open deserves to be strapped to a chair to have his nuts beating to a creamy consistency while sitting on a seatless chair a la Casino Royale.

This follows him revealing that he sends dishes out “floating” on a lavender air or balanced on “invisible” antennae.

I’m all for creativity and presentation when it comes to food.  Going to a restaurant and seeing the menu read “served on a bed of” or “with jus of…” gets boring, but do me a favour.

There are only two kinds of people you expect to cry when a meal is put in front of them, really really fat people and really really skinny people.  Both for different reasons.

Any normal person who gets emotionally involved with a restaurant meal needs nothing more than a swift and violent kick to the crotch.

Having said that, they were Americans so we shouldn’t be surprised.